Haven’t tried it yet but it has to operate on another frequency band and is quite limited in terms of duty cycles. I’ll try anyway, and I don’t think getting a licence to access higher duty cycles limits and power should be that hard.

Give them a reason to care : hosting series they want to watch but don’t have access to, easier ways to share images and data (close relative works part time in an enterprise that banned emails from non corporate addresses, she used to send the photos she needs for work to her work laptop through email, it’s the reason she uses Immich now) hosting banned movies, inaccessible old movies or any thing that may peek interest gets their finger in the cogs. Key aspect is : initial access must be EASY (an app launcher is often all that should be required)

It’s impossible to overcome from what I know, you can use SIM cards or even Musk-dishes but internet is public infrastructure reliant. For that kind of prepping (communication during exceptional conditions) look into radio communication.

It’s a bit steep, you can go on YouTube for a bit, then browse the documentation of any word you don’t understand (AI can help a lot with understanding but will get confused at any troubleshooting task) the steps can be resumed quite easily:

Find an OS:

• see what kind of data you’re working with (photos, videos, films,…) it all depends on your orientation/hobby/personality
• find what kind of applications you’d want to run, for how many people roughly ( personally I knew I would aim to replace netflix and cloud for close family and maybe a couple friends and circumvent as much as possible things like WeTransfer and compressions when sharing pictures in chats)
• see how much money and time you are willing to put in : first for the launch, then on a weekly basis (you can go for very cheap non redundant app first os like OP mentioned if you can pay to back it all up remotely/ have a separated NAS or see if you’d prefer to assume resilience mainly on your side)

Then you have a rough idea of your needs (this is all YouTube knowledge thus far, you can start looking at videos of people trying to use, comparing, ranking different solutions and tutos for how it’s like to set up for the first time and how do app work in those systems (docker, app stores, how big the community is around them, how much of a sysadmin you have to be to run and set it up…)

Then from that you can start seeing how which install fits in your budget and time allocation. After that, sinking hours of troubleshooting and setup is almost straightforward, it’s just going to be a list of side quests to complete the main one with a side of documentation.

On my side I initially wanted to go full free software, I wanted to use my 10 years old windows desktop to run trueNAS (it was already running jellyfin in docker desktop, useless for the process but is a fun starter to dip a toe in to get a feel). I bought on eBay a couple hard drives (ended up buying very cheap enterprise SAS, I recommend, mind you you’ll need a daughterboard)(you’ll see that different OS require different RAM, SSD, HDD ratios to run smoothly so recycling old hardware often requires upgrades) I completely failed to make trueNAS work correctly and since it’s enterprise first it has very… unfriendly conceptions about flexibility and user friendliness (brutal on the kind of budget and time I had).

After abandoning the project for a couple of months (due to exams mainly, and the fact I couldn’t repress myself from spending nights on unresolved issues) I decided to go the Unraid route (which is paid, yikes, but truly hasn’t let me down once, the community is huge and the software is rock solid and really helps you not fuck everything up (which trueNAS will happily let you do), I truly recommend that investment, they have a generous trial period, it’s really really great).

After that it’s just more setup for hours on end, transferring files to Immich, re-setting all the AI knowledge about faces (also for me a lot of metadata correction for very old family photos), letting disks and parity initialize, moving old backups from old drives into the new system, including the clean disks into the array, setting up prowlarr, radarr, sonarr, jellyfin.

Then comes the other hard question : how to do you access remotely ? (By now you already have a better idea about how docker and local network works and how important it is to secure it properly; and you’re about to learn how little your ISP cares about you)

I tried boilerplate wireguard, it’s wonderful but a very MANUAL setup with a DDNS. But honestly (even though I really did not want to spend another penny) the cloud flared tunnel with your own domain is kind of what you want (because they have neat zero trust features, for exemple to access any of the services I host that do not have to have in-app access (Immich, jellyfin, that have authentication built-in) are behind 2FA based on a short whitelist of email addresses which reduces immensely how much protection I have to care about.

After that you can go on to nextcloud (requires remote access on a domain) and all the rest of the fun stuff.

Now the thing is (like every hobby) there is a perfect solution, it’s at least tens of thousands of euros and you need a guy to manage it, but it’s bulletproof and will survive any attack.

You are not that person, you try stuff that is on your level, you don’t assume perfect functionality in one weekend and you take time to learn on every step of the way. In my quick little summary you can already feel (as I am a noob as well) that it’s a very iterative process, often you’ll half-ass something to move on, then come back to upgrade it when needed. You are very much building a machine, first from the hardware side, then mainly from the inside.

At some point you’ll have people around you start finding out how useful and interesting all this is, and it’s a very rewarding feeling to see what you assembled (because you haven’t typed a single command line in the terminal thus far) starting to get some use.

Hope this helps as a little piece of motivation, and if you are to start now I hope you have some old RAM laying around, in any case, start small and build up :)